I played Dungeon and Dragons this weekend with a group of close friends. I first played a single session of DnD back in Elementary school.  Later, I would get into it in earnest in Middle School and spend time playing it once a month from then through my college years (in fact one of the campaigns I ran during that time is the earliest iteration of Illithiust and Quartes). The hobby would largely disappear until 2020 when COVID actually helped me reconnect with some of my old friends as we all sought company while we were forced to be physical absent from much of the world.

Since then my friends and I have played sessions every two weeks fairly consistently (with my job using being the reason why we had to take the occasional break). We’ve traded off who has had the responsibility of Dungeon Master and I’m on my second turn at that mantle now. Playing DnD is a fun exercise in collaborative storytelling, as each of us brings our characters, unique perspectives, and backgrounds to the game. It also is very much driven by off the cuff reactions (the DM being really the only one who does some planning and that usually suffers from all the classic “First contact with enemy” metaphor). It makes for storytelling that is very much of the moment it was created, there are things from DnD sessions I would never think of when planning a story and that uniqueness an spontaneity creates a sort of magic.

When I think about it, rapid and collaborative storytelling is probably the very first kinda of stories I was a part of telling. Along with DnD, there was the “Add a sentence going around the campfire” stories of my Scouting years, and the years where I ran online fantasy roleplays on the community forums that were the ancestors to today’s subreddits and Discord servers (I wrote a novelization of one of those roleplays that ended up being my first novel length creation). It’s a fun and informative way to tell a story, with a mixture of so many different backgrounds and personalities. While there has been things I never could’ve written on my own, getting to see those unthought-of-moment be created helped grow my own perspectives and experiences, if not adding a background and personality then giving me a better knack at representing and imitating it when my characters need it. Calling on those is often a source of remembering those moments and those people, which means getting to spend a little more time with them again.

Writing is certainly a lonely enterprise, but storytelling is a collaboration even if not all the collaborators realize the impact they have had, even months and years later.  I wouldn’t be here with my Fey and Bard without those early stories and I’m so happy to have had them and to still be making them all these years later.

Plan is to continue with more Against the Riders this week. I enjoyed the shift from the Fey and Bard to Brokel and getting to learn more about him and his people. We can expect to spend more time with him this week as he heads into Verken, the City of Towers.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean